Mesmerizing GIFs Use Light and Motion to Visualize Sounds

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Mesmerizing GIFs Use Light and Motion to Visualize Sounds

Bad Trip

Stumblers

Commando Stairs

Field

Hierapolis Amphitheatre

Light Dome

Light Flood

Rats

Taksim Spiral

Visual artists long have been inspired by music and sound—and vice versa. Themes and concepts from one often infuse the other; well known examples include Kandinsky's Composition 8, inspired by a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin, or Rachmaninoff's 13 preludes, inspired by Böcklin's Die Heimkehr. For Turkish artist Erdal Inci, a fascination with the physics of sound—how vibrations manifest as tone and timbre—informs his loops of undulating movement and light.

Using props like light wands, flags, boards, and even his own body, Inci cavorts through Istanbul's public spaces to make short videos full of repeating motion. A metronome or music keeps his movement synchronized as he films with a fixed camera, allowing him to digitally clone and arrange himself into repeating visual waveforms that evoke the stuff of sound.

“The main idea was, ‘How I can visualize a single note?’,” he says. "If you clone a motion backwards in time until it fills the frame, it makes that motion perpetual so the timeline will become like a circle ... like a tone."

Watching an army of Incises march around Taksim Square might not make you hear music in your mind. The link to sound is more conceptual. Inci hopes his loops conjure an internal response similar to what you might experience listening to a sustained violin note, or standing in front of a bass speaker at a rave.

“When you listen to music or a sound, it makes you feel something,” he says. “I just wondered why a sound makes people feel something, and why it’s beautiful."

Light and sound are similar phenomena in that both are based on layers of frequencies that determine their character. The fundamental frequency creates the dominant color or pitch, intensity or volume. The details (like whether it sounds like a guitar or a pipe organ) are filled in by the many subtler frequencies that augment the fundamental frequency. They come together to create the whole of what we see or hear.

That bundle of frequencies is a pretty fair analogy for Inci's loops, which feature a strong fundamental wave (Inci’s motions) decorated by numerous other, less prominent repeating features and patterns, like birds in the sky or shadows on the walls of Istanbul’s historical architecture. These buildings, a prominent part of Inci's digital musings, create a historical contrast he likes to play with. Featuring give his GIFs an extra layer of subtle interplay. If the old buildings add character, the modern medium allows him to share the work with the world almost instantly.

“To get immediate feedback makes me happy,” he says. “It’s really good for me not to have to wait for the audience.”

The process for making one of these loops can either be very involved or fairly straightforward. It depends first on whether there are any people in the spaces where he’s filming. Each person that walks into the frame has to be manually removed. which is why he usually shoots in the very early morning hours when fewer people are around, and usually handles all the performance side himself. The resulting high definition video loop is then compressed into a GIF to be shared online.

For larger projects, he’ll maintain order by drawing chalk paths to follow through the numerous takes. Those takes—sometimes as many as 20 in a single image—then have to be stacked, coordinated, and manually cleaned up of any stray pedestrians. The shooting process is usually pretty quick, but the editing can take up to a week.

“I don’t need any production crew, just my camera and myself and I go out to work instantly when something comes up. I go out and finish the piece in one or two hours or less, and I come home and start to edit it. I don’t usually wait for the next day, I’m really excited about the final result so I prefer to finish it immediately,” he says.

The results are certainly hypnotic, and would be nearly impossible to achieve any other way. Try finding a thousand people who’ll walk along a road in sync and trip on exactly the right spot.

“If you move arrhythmically or chaotically, it won’t look hypnotic,” he says.